Alternate Best Actress Of 1940

Alternate Best Actress Of 1934: Reader Voted

I started putting these polls together a while back, got busy, forgot. Think I'll revive them in the run up to the Favorite Classic Movie Actress Tournament which begins in March. A shake down cruise, if you will.

The nominees are mine rather than the Academy's. The winner is up to you. Voting never closes. I think it's possible to share the poll on your own blog or Facebook page, but I'm not sure — just how tech savvy do you expect a Monkey to be?



You can find and vote in previous polls by clicking here.

What's The Second Best Bette Davis Movie?

Who Am Us writes to tell us that he finally saw his first Bette Davis movie, All About Eve, and that he loved it. And a good choice it was. If I were going to recommend one and only Bette Davis movie, that's the one I'd pick.

But what should he see next? Now, Voyager? The Letter? What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? Something else? Vote here, and remember an eager young man's budding infatuation with Bette Davis hangs in the balance.

Bette Davis: Your Favorite Classic Movie Actress Of 2014

The final contest seesawed back and forth for days, but in the end, Bette Davis defeated Barbara Stanwyck, 49-47, to win the 2014 Favorite Classic Movie Actress Tournament. I imagine she'll cherish this victory over even her two Academy Awards.

She's the tourney's fourth winner, joining Irene Dunne, Ginger Rogers and Carole Lombard in the winner's circle. Congratulations, Ms. Davis! Click here to head on over to Monty's site All Good Things and read more about it.

March Madness In April: Barbara Stanwyck And Bette Davis Duke It Out For The Title

The final round of Monty's Favorite Classic Movie Actress Tournament has started over at All Good Things. Barbara Stanwyck versus Bette Davis. Davis made it to the finals last year, losing to Carole Lombard. Stanwyck was this year's pre-tourney favorite. Either would be a worthy champion.

Click here to vote.

Here's a clip of Stanwyck with Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve. I had a lot of moments just like this one while working in a shoe store during my law school days:



And Bette Davis with Leslie Howard in Of Human Bondage—which also reminds me of law school:



And people wonder why I never go to reunions.

Final Four

No, not Florida, Kentucky, et al. Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor. The voting starts Saturday at All Good Things.

The Final Four Is Set

The final four is set in the 2013 Favorite Classic Movie Actress Tournament—three favorites and a longshot, any one of whom would make a worthy winner.

The matches:

Carole Lombard

versus

Doris Day

with the winner to compete against the winner of

Bette Davis

versus

Diana Rigg

Voting starts tomorrow is now underway and runs through Tuesday at All Good Things.

Alexandra Petri's New Oscar Categories (Taken More Seriously Than She Intended) (Part Two)

(Read part one here.)

Best Heartstring-Tugging Child
Let's just go back to the first truly great child performance in movies, Jackie Coogan in Charlie Chaplin's The Kid. If you don't get a little misty when Chaplin rescues him from the orphanage goons, your heart is made of stone.

Hard to believe that cute little tyke grew up to become this guy:

Yikes!

Best Performance With a Director Who Was Really Hard to Work With
You could interpret this question a couple of ways. William Wyler was notoriously difficult to work with—for example, once requiring Bette Davis to do forty takes of a scene in Jezebel where she did nothing but walk down a flight of stairs. Actors, though, knew that Wyler could see something they often couldn't so they put up with him and the result was that he still holds the record for directing the most Oscar-nominated and Oscar-winning performances (36 and 14, respectively).

Fritz Lang, on the other hand, was just an anal-retentive a-hole who would do things like delay production for five hours while he fiddled with a fake cobweb in the background. I get the impression actors succeeded in his films in spite of him rather than because of him. In which case, I choose Peter Lorre's performance in M as the best of the bunch.

Best Weird Thing James Franco Thought Would Be Interesting to Try
I confess I read this one and thought "Now who is James Franco again? Oh, right, the former fascist dictator of Spain." To which the answer is probably "Guernica."

But then I did a little research and found out that James Franco is some sort of an actor. Boy, he's made a lot of crap, hasn't he.

Best Portrayal of a Recovering Addict
He wasn't all that recovering and who knows about babies crawling along the ceiling, but I did very much enjoy Ewan McGregor's performance as a heroin addict who goes cold turkey in the 1996 British comedy Trainspotting. Highly recommended.

Best Surprisingly Grounded Performance in a Superhero Film
I'll probably get drummed out of some sort of bloggers club for this, but I'm not that big a fan of superhero movies. I hate the "with great power comes great responsibility" gibberish that movies like Spider-Man palm off on us. That, and the inevitable Kryptonite business.

And what is it with all the tights?

That said, I'm going with Will Smith in Hancock. Hancock is very much the kind of superhero I would be if I suddenly found myself thrust into that role—just your basic anti-social "leave me alone, why don't you people grow up" kind of superhero. Don't know that I'd become a homeless alcoholic, but I'd probably spend even more time talking to the dog than I already do.

Tomorrow: Quentin Tarantino, diseases, arm-waving, sadness and nudity.

Meet The Author Of The Entertainer—And See A Movie!

Margaret Talbot, author of The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century, will be introducing the best of her father Lyle Talbot's films at the AFI-Silver on Saturday.

Three on a Match is the story of three classmates—bad girl Joan Blondell, good girl Bette Davis, and rich girl Ann Dvorak—who meet three very different fates. A pre-Code classic, Three on a Match packs episodes of drug addiction, adultery, prostitution, blackmail, kidnapping, child neglect, suicide and Bette Davis in her undies into 63 breakneck minutes. It also features the best performance of Lyle Talbot's career as a weak-willed hoodlum who invites Dvorak to take a walk on the wild side.

Great stuff.

The show starts at 4 pm this Saturday, December 1, 2012, at the AFI-Silver in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Don't know yet whether I'll be in attendance—I'm actually typing this post three weeks in advance—but I can't imagine I'll introduce myself to Margaret Talbot even if I do attend. The Monkey don't schmooze!

Book Review: The Entertainer By Margaret Talbot (Highly Recommended)

I have to admit, when the galley proof of The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century by Margaret Talbot arrived in the mail, I had my doubts. Hollywood memoirs are an uneven lot at best, often badly-written tales told by professional raconteurs, blabbermouths, axe-grinders, apologists, sex fiends and fantasists, only rarely amounting to more than 200 pages of time-marking windbaggery designed to collect an advance check and nothing more.

And the memoirs of the children of Hollywood stars are usually worse—distilling into either bitter hatchet jobs or worshipful love notes.

Bleh.

But I couldn't have been more wrong about this one. I was hooked on The Entertainer before I finished the preface and now rank it as one of the best Hollywood memoirs I've ever read.

The Entertainer—the story of Golden Age Hollywood actor Lyle Talbot—reminded me of two truths: first, that you don't have to be famous to be interesting (and vice versa), and second, that acting, like baseball, "may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it's also a job." (Bull Durham, in case you don't remember the quote.) Also that the story of Hollywood's evolution from a small company town to the largest purveyor of entertainment in the world—when told as well as it is here—is a fascinating one.

Okay, that's three things.

Lyle Talbot got his first lesson in acting early. Raised by his maternal grandmother in a small Nebraska town shortly after the turn of the century, Talbot routinely got a beating if he didn't shed enough tears over a lock of his dead mother's hair—the mother who had died shortly after Lyle's birth. Bewildered by this remembrance of a woman he'd never known, Talbot soon learned to conjure up the appropriate response even if he didn't quite know why he needed to. But he learned his lesson well, figuring out how to please people and enjoying the positive attention he got when he did.

At fifteen, Talbot left home to live with his father—his grandmother had forbidden a relationship with the man who had knocked-up her teenage daughter and carted her off to Pittsburgh for a quickie marriage—a pivotal moment in the boy's life. His father and his new stepmother were small-time performers, and Talbot joined a world of traveling carnivals, working first as a magician's assistant, then as a "plant" for a hypnotist, pretending to be hypnotized and doing crazy things to warm up the audience.

The two funniest anecdotes in the book make it clear it's a miracle Talbot made the transition to acting at all. Hired on as a bit actor in a traveling theater troupe, Talbot mistimed a staged punch in the very first scene of his very first performance and cold-cocked the star, leading to an early curtain. Only the intervention of the troupe manager's wife—she was sweet on the handsome boy—saved his job.

Years later, in 1932, Warner Brothers invited Talbot to Hollywood for a screen test. By now Talbot was an accomplished stage performer, but he was still wet behind the ears when it came to the internal workings of studio politics. For his screen test, he selected a fast-talking scene from a play he'd done many times, Louder Please, a comedy about a lecherous movie producer. He knew the part cold and had always gotten laughs when he played it on stage, but what he didn't realize was that Louder Please had been written by a disgruntled ex-Warners employee, Norman Krasna, about the studio's boss, Darryl F. Zanuck, a fact everybody in Hollywood but Talbot knew.

Fortunately, Zanuck was in a forgiving mood when he watched the tests the next day—or maybe it's that he had maverick director "Wild Bill" Wellman in tow—and Talbot got a contract.

Being one himself, Wellman loved troublemakers and despite the fact that Talbot was in fact a pretty straight arrow, immediately cast him in three of his movies, Love is a Racket with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., The Purchase Price with Barbara Stanwyck, and College Coach with Dick Powell and Pat O'Brien.

Like most second tier players in those days, Talbot worked like a dog, making eleven movies in 1932, ten in 1933 and ten more in 1934.

The best of his films was probably Three on a Match, starring Bette Davis, Joan Blondell and Ann Dvorak. One of the fastest and most cynical films of the pre-Code era, Three on a Match packs episodes of drug addiction, adultery, prostitution, blackmail, kidnapping, child neglect, suicide and Bette Davis in her undies into 63 breakneck minutes. Talbot's role as a weak-willed hoodlum who lures a rich housewife into a life of sex, champagne and cocaine was a memorable one.

"I can tell you're a real woman," he tells Dvorak at one point, "not one of those stuffed brassieres you see on Park Avenue."

What woman wouldn't swoon!

He also had good parts in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing opposite Spencer Tracy, Ladies They Talk About (Stanwyck again), and Mary Stevens, M.D. with Kay Francis at the height of her career.

Yet despite a big build-up and favorable notices, Talbot never achieved the stardom the studio had mapped out for him.

For one thing, he was involved for a while with Sam Warner's widow, Lina Basquette, whom the surviving Warner brothers had branded a "bad mother" and used the press and a pile of money to extort custody of her daughter from her. Despite pressure from his bosses, Talbot refused to break off the liaison, gallantly rising to her defense. For all the good it did. In the end, it was Basquette herself who ended the affair, taking up with another man right there in Talbot's living room while Talbot slept one off in the next room. (What can I say, Basquette liked men and wound up marrying nine of them, although not all at the same time.)

And then he developed a fondness for alcohol—Hollywood was a small town with lots of distractions, and the actors liked to blow off steam in places like the Brown Derby and the Cocoanut Grove. A teetotaler by upbringing, Talbot discovered he enjoyed the buoyant feeling he got from a drink, and with what was likely a genetic predisposition to alcoholism, he started lapping it up and found he couldn't stop. His drinking never prevented him from working, but the tabloid tales of drunken buffoonery didn't help his standing with a studio already worried about the trajectory of his career.

Nor did Talbot endear himself to his paymasters by co-founding the Screen Actors Guild, the first effective union of movie actors. The studios in those days worked their actors like plow horses, starting at 6 a.m., working until 8 p.m.—midnight on Saturdays!—six day a week. Theoretically, the actors got six weeks of vacation annually, but the studios often loaned them out during these stretches, and with no leverage to speak of, the actors had to take it and like it. Talbot was no political firebrand—he was close to apolitical—but like eighteen of the other twenty original founders, he came from a stage background which did have a strong union, and he instinctively rallied to the support of his fellow actors whom he thought of as his family.

But what ultimately derailed Talbot's path to stardom was his lack of that indefinable "it"—the charisma that makes your eyes go to a performer no matter what else was happening on the screen. Talbot was good-looking, but not as startlingly handsome as Robert Taylor; he was a ladies man, but wasn't as charmingly roguish as Clark Gable; he was hard-working but not as manically animated as James Cagney. He was a competent actor (occasionally better than that) and whatever role you asked him to play, he'd learn his lines and do a good job, but he had no edge, no mystery, no intriguing contradictions, and when you get right down to it, there was always somebody at hand who could play it better—thus, he was good enough to land good parts in a handful of good movies, but never great enough to land the great part in a great movie.

He wound up as one of the legion of "oh, yeah, that guy" character actors who filled out cast lists in nearly two hundred movies, and later nearly three hundred episodes of series television.

Warner Brothers dropped Talbot in 1936, and after that the parts he played were more and more forgettable—his best known movies on the downhill slide are probably the ones he made for the notorious Ed Wood, Plan 9 From Outer Space and Glen or Glenda. He had an unexpected Broadway hit during the war in the bedroom farce Separate Rooms, joined the Air Force where he organized entertainment for the troops, made serials (he was film's first Lex Luthor) and then settled into television. He was part of the cast of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, appearing in 72 episodes, and played guest spots on everything from Bonanza to Leave it to Beaver.

In fact, Talbot acted steadily until his retirement in 1987, when he appeared in an episode of Newhart and the movie Amazon Women of the Moon. He died in 1996 at the age of 94. He won no awards, received no nominations, and as far as I know, doesn't even have a star on the sidewalk in the town he called home for decades.

So what makes this biography of a relatively-unknown journeyman so fascinating?

Well, for one thing, Margaret Talbot is a terrific writer—working for the last decade as a staffer at The New Yorker, and before that for The New York Times Magazine and as an editor at The New Republic. She has an easy style that can serve up a memorable line seemingly without effort, such as with this description of pre-Code actress Glenda Farrell: "When she talked fast, as she almost always did, it was like the strident clackety-clack of a typewriter; you half expected her to ring at the end of a sentence."

But more than that, Talbot is only half telling the story of her father. What she's really doing is telling the story of entertainment in America during the 20th century. Her father acted in practically every medium there was—stage, radio, movies, television—and witnessed (and participated in) the development of the concept of "mass media." In telling her father's story, she evokes the Hollywood of the 1930s, New York of the early '40s, television in the '50s and '60s, and perhaps most interesting, the life of the actor living out of a trunk, playing tiny towns all over the American midwest nearly a hundred years ago, a way of life that came to end, ironically, when talkies came in.

She also writes of Lyle as a prime example of what she argues was the transformation of American values from the 19th century's focus on "character" (how one might be perceived in the "eyes of God") to the 20th century's fascination with "personality" (how we sell an image of ourselves to others).

All in all, a terrific story. Highly recommended.

The Entertainer is published by Riverhead Books and hits stores today. To promote the book's publication, the American Film Institute will be showing ten of Lyle Talbot's pre-Code movies at the AFI-Silver in Silver Spring, Maryland, from December 1 thru the 19th. Check listings.

Before, During And After #4: Bette Davis

age 16

age 30 (from her Oscar-winning performance in Jezebel, 1938)

age 79, by Alistair Morrison

The Ten: Best Actresses Of All Time Relay

The Monkey has been tagged as the next participant in what is being called "The Ten: Best Actresses of All Time Relay Race." Also known as "the meme with an oddly-placed colon in the middle." The idea being this: that the blog master at My Film Views came up with a list of those actresses he (and/or she, I'm not sure which) feels are the ten best ever.

And then he tags some other blogger and says "take one name off the list and add one of your own and pass it on." Forever. Research reveals that this list originally started in 1927 and included such names as Sarah Bernhardt and Nefertiti.

Anyway, Natalie over at In The Mood has passed the baton on to me. Natalie, who is co-hosting the Great Recasting Blogathon on July 27-28, is currently responsible for my latest obsession, which is making posters for silent era "pre-makes" of post-1966 movies. I've done twenty-two so far, plus written a separate 1000+ word essay about a twenty-third movie.

The good news is that as a result, I've really crawled inside Photoshop Elements and learned a lot. The bad news is that the human race will one day vanish from the universe like a soap bubble and I'll have done nothing much to stop that from happening.

Oh, well.

The list is currently as follows: 1.Barbara Stanwyck 2.Ingrid Bergman 3.Isabelle Huppert 4.Joan Crawford 5.Juliette Binoche 6.Maggie Cheung 7.Katharine Hepburn 8.Meryl Streep 9.Lillian Gish 10.Olivia de Havilland.

Okay, five of those names would be on my top ten, and three more are at least vaguely defensible.

Which leaves Juliette Binoche and Maggie Cheung on my "to be booted" list. Both are fine actresses to be sure. Both have multiple international acting awards. And Binoche has won as Oscar.

But neither has had much of an impact in this country—Cheung's best known film according to Imdb.com is Hero, Binoche's is probably The English Patient, although she's better in Three Colors: Blue—and call me a parochial xenophobe (which I'm not, but you can call me whatever you want) (especially now that comment moderation has been activated), but I think it's hard to make a claim for the title of one of the ten best actresses in history if you've never penetrated the mainstream consciousness of the American movie-going public.

To me, best implies not just talent, but impact and longevity. Binoche and Cheung have talent, and they've been around a while, but neither has had the impact necessary to qualify as great.

On the basis of having at least won an Academy Award, I'll let Binoche skate. Thus, so long Maggie Cheung. We hardly knew you. Which is the problem.

To be replaced by Bette Davis. Two-time Oscar winner. Kicked down doors in Hollywood that lots of actresses later filed through. Not to mention a song about her eyes was once a huge hit. That's good enough for me. Can't believe she wasn't on this list to begin with.

So now I'm handing this on to the guy who invented the March Madness Best Actress Tournament and let me join in the fun this year, Monty at All Good Things. Take it away, Monty, if you feel up to it.

The Sum Of The Parts

Learned something interesting today. What do you get when you combine the forehead of Myrna Loy ...

the eyes of Bette Davis ...

the nose of Grace Kelly ...

and the mouth of Julie Andrews?


The Phantom of the Opera. Oh, well, we do our best ...

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1941)

I won a major award last November for my thoughts on Citizen Kane which you can read here. I won't rehash any of that now except to say that despite its revered status as the classic to end all classics, Citizen Kane is a terrifically entertaining and satisfying movie.

Or to put it another way, just because your 10th grade English teacher made you read Silas Marner and called it a "classic"—because that's what this is all about, isn't it—that's no reason to avoid Citizen Kane.

My other thought (SPOILERS AHEAD) is about Mary Astor, whose performance in The Maltese Falcon is surprisingly divisive among classic movie fans. Many think she is not nearly enough of a "knockout" to justify Sam Spade's interest in her.

Me, I think the thirty-five year old Astor was perfectly cast.

We've grown inured to the notion that in movies, forty-two year old actors should hook up with twenty-four year old actresses, but the fact is, if Bogart's Sam Spade had flipped for a young hottie, we the audience would have concluded that he was thinking with his libido and she was playing him for a sap.

Very noirish, but rendering the twist ending emotionally hollow, in my opinion.

As it stands, they come to each other as equals: he's found his soul mate, someone as smart, amoral and reptilian as he is; and she, after a decade of knocking around places like Istanbul and Hong Kong with a collection of tough, dim pretty boys, has at last met a man with whom she feels truly safe.

Ironic how it works out.

That they are both also rapidly approaching their sell-by date makes the ending all the more poignant.

But maybe that's just the romantic in me.

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: Citizen Kane (prod. Orson Welles)
nominees: High Sierra (prod. Hal B. Wallis); How Green Was My Valley (prod. Darryl F. Zanuck); The Little Foxes (prod. Samuel Goldwyn); The Maltese Falcon (prod. Hal B. Wallis)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Sullivan's Travels (prod. Preston Sturges)
nominees: The Devil And Miss Jones (prod. Frank Ross); Fantasia (prod. Walt Disney); Here Comes Mr. Jordan (prod. Everett Riskin); The Lady Eve (prod. Paul Jones)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Genroku Chûshingura (The 47 Ronin) (prod. Shintarô Shirai)
nominees: Todake no kyodai (The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family) (prod. Shôchiku Film)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Orson Welles (Citizen Kane)
nominees: Humphrey Bogart (High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon); Walter Huston (The Devil and Daniel Webster); Herbert Marshall (The Little Foxes); Tyrone Power (Blood and Sand)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Gary Cooper (Meet John Doe and Ball Of Fire)
nominees: Charles Coburn (The Devil And Miss Jones); W.C. Fields (Never Give A Sucker An Even Break); Henry Fonda (The Lady Eve); Joel McCrea (Sullivan's Travels); Robert Montgomery (Here Comes Mr. Jordan); William Powell (Love Crazy and Shadow of the Thin Man)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Bette Davis (The Little Foxes)
nominees: Joan Crawford (A Woman's Face); Olivia de Havilland (Hold Back The Dawn); Irene Dunne (Penny Serenade); Joan Fontaine (Suspicion); Vivien Leigh (That Hamilton Woman)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Barbara Stanwyck (Ball Of Fire and The Lady Eve)
nominees: Jean Arthur (The Devil And Miss Jones); Deanna Durbin (It Started With Eve); Wendy Hiller (Major Barbara); Dorothy Lamour (Road to Zanzibar); Myrna Loy (Love Crazy and Shadow of the Thin Man)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Orson Welles (Citizen Kane)
nominees: John Ford (How Green Was My Valley); John Huston (The Maltese Falcon); Raoul Walsh (High Sierra); William Wyler (The Little Foxes)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Preston Sturges (The Lady Eve and Sullivan's Travels)
nominees: Frank Capra (Meet John Doe); Alexander Hall (Here Comes Mr. Jordan); Howard Hawks (Ball of Fire); Sam Wood (The Devil and Miss Jones)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Sidney Greenstreet (The Maltese Falcon)
nominees: Donald Crisp (How Green Was My Valley); William Demarest (The Lady Eve); James Gleason (Here Comes Mr. Jordan); Peter Lorre (The Maltese Falcon); Claude Rains (Here Comes Mr. Jordan)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Mary Astor (The Great Lie and The Maltese Falcon)
nominees: Sara Allgood (How Green Was My Valley); Spring Byington (The Devil And Miss Jones); Patricia Collinge (The Little Foxes); Veronica Lake (Sullivan's Travels); Teresa Wright (The Little Foxes)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz (Citizen Kane)
nominees: John Huston (The Maltese Falcon); Preston Sturges (The Lady Eve and Sullivan's Travels)

SPECIAL AWARDS
Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane) (Cinematography); Perry Ferguson and Van Nest Polglase; Al Fields and Darrell Silvera (Citizen Kane) (Art Direction-Set Decoration); Bernard Herrmann (Citizen Kane) (Score); Robert Wise (Citizen Kane) (Film Editing)